Shaun Ryan

I understand the enthusiasm for the latest "new media", but am skeptical of the underlying premise -- at least as far as I'm even sure I understand it. I watched the Wesch us/ing Web 2.0 video and came away thinking that the gentleman is substituting excitement about technology for knowledge of history.

The premise I took from the video is that technologies like XML and their application on the Web are allowing us to separate form and content. If he'd stopped at adding "in new and exciting ways", I'd be with him. The kicker was the text stream at the end underlining all things (love, family, commerce, whatever) that we have to reinterpret.

No kidding, really? Technology and social change are linked? You don't say. I'd submit that the evolution of technology and its impact on communication is not something that XML or HTML or even the printing press initially caused, it's something that these developments have accelerated. Knowledge has been spreading itself outwards, sometimes imperceptibly slowly, since stone tablets and papyrus were battling for mind-share among temple scribes. What's different today is the velocity of the change, not the vector.

I read into the video an underlying assumption that the printed or written word is static and moldy compared to its vastly more flexible digital cousin. This is pretentious, and I think in a long view, it's also wrong because, ironically, it confuses message and medium. The power is still in the idea and what people do with it, not necessarily how it's disseminated.

<cite>To put this in context, aggregating all the programming of the three primary networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) for the past sixty years would result in a total of 1.5 million hours of video programming. Those 1.5 million hours are equivalent to less than 6 months of the content submitted to YouTube. </cite>

OK, so what? Isn't that self-evident? A million people with camcorders can produce way more footage than a few thousand with studios. It's not context, it's a statistic. That figure does represent a democratization of the output and publishing of ideas, but what that really means for us as a society is too early to tell. The printing press was significant not because you got a better Bible, but because of the impact over centuries of the increased literacy that it enabled. Isn't it a bit early to call Web 2.0 its equal?

The real implication here to me is self-worship. "Hey look, I can put an hour of video up as easily as some schmuck from XYZ-TV." Uh, ok. I can too, but that doesn't mean anyone wants to hear what I have to say. The saying that the "media is the message" invites narcissism. I'm enlightening the universe 140 letters at a time! I made a Lolcat poster! I'm blogging, Mom! My ideas are better that yours because I used social websites to put them out in XML! My content and my substance are separate! Great, but what do those things have to offer anyone other than you?

Am I wrong? Am I reading too much/too little into this? Welcome other thoughts.

Or I guess more precisely, over what kind of time frame are we looking? For Apple, the point that Greg made in the first response is probably a key one. In the short-term (which is a decade-plus, in this case) a "beautiful fascist" rescued Apple from the dead and built a following the likes of which other companies would sell their grandmothers to get even a pale imitation. But what happens when that key individual goes?

That kind of very strong centralizing, controlling leader-figure may find it extremely hard to promote the kind of subordinates and thinkers who can replace them when they go. And being human, they're going go at some point. I was struck by a comment in an article about the Apple townhall meeting after the iPad launch that Jobs takes questions from employees who were brave enough to risk "taking one between the eyes". That might have been a rhetorical flourish, but it speaks to a style of communication that makes great copy but maybe not for an open or honest give-and-take.

Long term, can they sustain that magic touch, when so much of it seems to center not in the company's culture, but in one individual leader? It's possible there's a strong, capable team of near-equals there, but pop quiz -- name one of them.